


Evergreen

by Aloysia_Virgata



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-12
Updated: 2016-12-12
Packaged: 2018-09-08 05:28:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8832226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aloysia_Virgata/pseuds/Aloysia_Virgata
Summary: One-shot set a few weeks before Christmas Carol.





	

***

They are in a K Street bar, dark paneled with brass railing and heavy furniture. The kind where power brokers meet in Zegna suits to quietly run the world. To bury the truths she is now compelled to unearth. 

Mulder’s long fingers are idly circling the rim of a thick rock glass, something golden and Scottish warming the light that passes through it. Scully had wanted white wine but was too self-conscious to order it, felt like a child requesting a scoop of vanilla ice cream while the adults had coffee. She went with a gin and tonic instead, a vibrant lime wedge perched on the side like a tropical bird.

She studies her partner, his face a strangely handsome sum of disparate parts. She forgets that Mulder is attractive, that he is a pleasing package of stylish hair and good tailoring that would appeal to a woman who hadn’t had to curl away from his leggy sprawl in coach or watch his endless slideshows.

Scully’s taken cues from him though, more polished and somber now, sleekly clipped hair and trimmer seams. She fits in with the women here, drinking their martinis over leather portfolios while they make assertive cell phone calls. _A boss bitch,_ Missy would say.

She smiles, sipping at her drink.

“Thinking about Brad Pitt again?” Mulder asks.

“Oh, always.”

Mulder grins. “I won’t tell that guy over by the door, then. He’s been checking you out since we got here.”

Scully takes another sip and glances sidelong down the bar. A handsome man with greying temples offers her a wink. She thinks she’s seen him on CNN.

She looks away, miffed.

“You’re gonna shoot him down after a suave come-on like that?”

“I like a little more from a suitor than control of the orbicularis oculi, thanks.”

“Aw, he looks like a perfectly nice sugar daddy.”

She huffs, squeezing the lime hard between her fingers. Cloudy juice runs down her thumb, stinging a paper cut she didn’t even know about. The pain is sour on the back of her tongue, like a penny.

Mulder leans back, stretching. “I don’t think my guy’s coming, you want to split? It’s Friday night, you probably have an exciting lecture on adipocere to attend.”

She almost says yes until she realizes that it’s nice to sit here with her partner in neutral territory. It’s nice to be in the world at the end of a long week. “I’m okay to stick around for a few, actually. If you are.”

He looks surprised, but pleased. “Sure, yeah.” Mulder raises his glass. “Cheers, Scully.”

She clinks hers against it. “TGIF,” she says.

Mulder sets his glass down and picks a few cashews from the bowl of beer nuts. “How’s your sister in law?”

“Couple more weeks. She’s hanging in there better than Bill, honestly.” Her brother has been driving everyone insane with nuisance questions as though he and Tara were the first humans to sexually reproduce.

Mulder, having encountered the Bill Mystique, smirks. “I bet. Names picked out yet?”

Scully shrugs, hunting for Brazil nuts. “Melissa for a girl probably, and I guess William for a boy.” She rolls her eyes at this. “William Scully III. Pretentious, isn’t it?”

“Aristocratic,” Mulder says with diplomacy.

“Kings of the Lace Curtain Irish.” She sucks on the webbing at the base of her thumb.

“That’ll be nice, though. Either way.”

“Yeah.” Her voice isn’t convincing, even to her ears.

Mulder, psychologist that he is, perks up. “No?”

Scully takes a deep drink of gin. “No, I mean…it is. It’s good.” The alcohol buzzes through her, warm and sweet.

“Sounds like a variant of ‘I’m fine, Mulder.’”

She elbows him. “He was my dad. And Bill is my brother.”

Mulder takes a swallow of scotch. “And you love them. That doesn’t mean they’re faultless. Loving a flawed person isn’t an indictment of your character, Scully.” 

She sighs, wishing Mulder were less insightful at times. “Ahab was…complicated. And my brother is very much his son. It’s just a big name to live up to, I don’t know. They’re good men.” She doesn’t talk about Ahab shouting at her socialist sister, her gay brother, her badge and gun. Bill, the smug golden boy, preening. That’s all a few drinks away at least.

Mulder folds a napkin into a paper football. “Well, you’ll keep an eye on the kid. Make sure there’s a solid rebellious streak. Be fun Auntie Dana.”

Scully’s laugh is a sharp bark. “Fun Auntie Dana? Come on, Mulder. I’m hardly a wellspring of spontaneity.” 

Somewhere between her dog dying and her sister in law’s pregnancy, Scully has begun to examine her overall fitness as a caretaker. It is a dull, omnipresent feeling, like a toothache. She likes to poke it every so often, to see if it hurts.

It does.

He finishes his drink. “Ah, you’re all right. I could tell the kid some stories to make you look cool.”

Unaccountably, she blushes. “I like children. I feel protective, of course. I’m just not….nurturing by nature, I suppose. I’m not good at being silly.” 

“You’re a doctor,” he says, puzzled. “That seems to speak of a nurturing nature.”

“Mulder, most of my patient encounters begin with disembowelment.” 

They share a smile at that.

“Fair,” he says. “I guess people pick it up as they go. One day you’ve got some guy’s liver in your hands, and the next you’re singing along with Barney.” 

Scully drains her glass and boldly motions the bartender for another. She’ll regret this later, but for now, she wants the excuse to stay. 

“See?” Mulder says. “That was spontaneous.” He taps the bar for another as well.

She follows the grain of the wood with a manicured nail.

“You okay?” her partner asks.

She stares up at the lights, letting them blur across her eyes. “Yeah. Yes. I was just thinking how in med school I was going to marry a nice anesthesiologist and now I don’t want anyone messing up my throw pillows.”

“You _really_ don’t like conscious people, huh?”

Her response is a hiccupy laugh. The lights swim into halos. She returns her attention to Mulder, squinting. “Not most.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“You should. What about you, Mulder? You’re good with kids. You’re fun.”

He looks taken aback. “I’m fun?”

Scully waves her hand, trying to come up with an example. “You’re…you’re probably good with Legos that don’t have instructions.”

Mulder’s eyes crinkle at the corners. “Give yourself more credit, Starbuck.”

It’s a throwaway comment, but oh, how it smarts. She quashed her impulses as best she could, she denied herself pleasures for the ascetic purity of being Ahab’s little Starbuck. But Bill was a boy, and boys will be men without the stain of Eve upon them.

She thinks of her rabbit and wonders if that’s when she decided only the dead were fit for her ministrations. That bunny would have been a sad mistake for a boy but for a girl it seemed a dark perversion. Her father considered Melissa, though ignorant and foolish, at least femininely tenderhearted. 

“Scully?” Mulder says, concerned.

“Mmmm, sorry. Gin went straight to my head.” She widens her eyes to convey this.

“Okay.”

Scully looks out the window. There is a scrap of sky between the buildings, violet and orange with stars at the far edge. Night comes on so fast.

“Mulder,” she says.

“Hmmm?”

She wants to ask if she is good to him, if she’s been kind or merely dutiful. She wants to know if he sees spring in her, or just an everlasting autumn.

“Let’s go for a walk. I need to clear my head.”

He pays their tab with company money and they shrug into their coats. Scully catches her reflection in the mirror, hair swishing over her collar. The man who winked at her is staring openly but she doesn’t care.

Outside the air is a slap. Shoppers bustle by, peering in at Christmas displays, walking dogs and herding small children. Scully feels like a visitor in their world, taking in the strange local customs with her fellow traveler.

They make a fine pair in the window glass, she and Mulder, and she wonders what stories passers-by make up for the two of them. A wealthy power couple, or maybe partners at a law firm. 

The silence is long.

“After my divorce,” Mulder says, “I didn’t feel sure of who I was anymore. I felt like I had to recontextualize myself.”

She is sad that he defines himself by the missing women in his life and squeezes his arm.

He smiles down at her. “What I mean is, reevaluating isn’t a death knell of your whole identity.”

The alcohol is fading from her cheeks, leaving a different kind of warmth there. “Who says I’m reevaluating anything?”

“You. And all my degrees.”

“Well, then kindly stop thinking so much.”

“Me? All you _do_ is think. I can hear you, like an old grandfather clock.”

“Well, as long as it’s not a cuckoo.”

“No, that’s me,” he says.

The gin is gone now, leaving her clenched and cold. She tucks her chin against her lapels, nose painful in the sharp gusts of wind. Her fingertips are numb.

Mulder clucks his tongue. “Look at you,” he admonishes, fussing with her collar. “You’re half frozen. Wait under that awning while I get a taxi.”

Scully doesn’t argue, just tucks herself against a potted Douglas fir that’s been decorated for the season. The comforting smell of coffee seeps from the shop’s door.

She peers around the tree while Mulder heroically leaps at a yellow cab, which screeches to a halt. He waves her over and something stirs inside, like a crocus beneath the snow.


End file.
